PGCE (Modern Languages)

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2025 places the University of Oxford’s Department of Education as first in Britain for Degrees in Education for the thirteenth year running. Over many years, it has consistently received the highest possible designation (Outstanding) from Ofsted in inspections. The University of Oxford’s Department of Education has a long history in initial teacher education, dating back to 1892.

The department works in partnership with over 37 secondary comprehensive schools in Oxfordshire and neighbouring counties, with most being within 30 miles of Oxford. The programme has been developed with colleagues from Oxfordshire partnership schools and covers the key professional skills of:

• lesson planning and preparation
• assessment, recording and reporting
• responding to individual learning needs
• classroom and behaviour management.

The course works on an internship model (the Oxford Internship Scheme) which recognises the different roles of university and schools in teacher education and the need for a truly collaborative partnership. Such collaboration involves joint responsibility within the partnership for the planning, delivery and assessment of the programme. Student teachers are known as interns during the PGCE course.

In addition to being awarded the PGCE qualification, successful interns are also recommended for Qualified Teacher Status, which indicates that they have met the requirements of the Government’s Teachers’ Standards.

The PGCE in Modern Languages at Oxford is offered in Chinese (Mandarin), French, German and Spanish.

We expect you to be able to offer two Modern Languages (from the four listed above), and we can provide a range of placements for various combinations of these languages. We may not be able to offer you an interview if we do not have school placement capacity in your preferred language combination.

It is important that you have qualifications in both the languages that you wish to teach. For your main language, these qualifications should preferably be at university level, or you should have it as one of your first languages, e.g. have spoken it from a young age. You will be expected to teach your main language up to and including A-level.

For your second language, your qualifications should preferably be at A-level or equivalent (B2 CEFR level). You will be expected to teach your second language up to age 14 as a minimum.

The Modern Languages PGCE course is designed and implemented jointly by colleagues in schools and the university working in close partnership. It is not our aim to prescribe particular approaches to teaching Modern Languages, but rather to enable you to draw on the full range of different sources available to you for your own professional learning – and in so doing to develop a clear and reasoned understanding of the sort of teacher that you want to become. Tutors on the course, who have many years of classroom teaching experience as well as teacher training experience, will guide you and support you in this exciting but challenging process.

Our course will help you to become an effective and confident teacher by providing you with the following:

• opportunities to observe other practitioners in the classroom and to understand their decision making;
• insight into theories and findings from research into Second Language Acquisition, helping you to understand how adolescents learn a modern language in a classroom setting;
• opportunities to learn from school pupils themselves about their experiences of language learning and the barriers they encounter;
• opportunities to learn from, and share good practice with, other beginning teachers working in different school contexts;
• practical advice on: the preparation, teaching and evaluation of languages lessons; how to assess and monitor pupils’ progress; promoting positive behaviour for learning; and responding to the diverse needs of individual pupils;
• opportunities to try out and systematically evaluate a range of teaching approaches in a range of classrooms over an extended period of time; and
• many ideas for using and adapting a range of modern language materials in the classroom.

The course begins with an orientation experience in September spending three days in a primary school of your choice.

This is followed by the first week in the University of Oxford’s Department of Education. The rest of the autumn term is made up of joint weeks with two days spent in the University and three days in school. You will be attached to the same state secondary school for the majority of the year, which makes it possible for you to get to know teachers and pupils in the school and to understand the school’s policies and practices.

The spring term consists primarily of school experience and for the summer term, interns move to a second school so that they have the opportunity to consolidate and extend their understanding and experience of learning and teaching.

This course structure reflects the internship model in that it is designed to:

• enable interns to become fully integrated into one school over a long period;
• enable interns to learn about their own teaching in the context of the wider school, rather than focusing initially on their own classroom and only later widening their view;
• allow schools to offer coherent and challenging professional development programmes over the course of the long placement, and in the short placement focus on preparation for continuing professional development;
• enable school-based mentors to see interns’ development from the start of the course to a position of competence; and
• offer interns the opportunity to encounter a new school context at a time of the course when they are ready to make critical comparisons.

The Professional Tutor responsible for interns at the school co-ordinates school-based activities related to general educational issues, called the school Professional Development Programme (PDP).

Some aspects of the PDP are planned and organised for all interns by university tutors, who take responsibility for particular issues. The detailed programme for the interns in each school, however, is organised by the Professional Tutor and General Tutor for that school.